Colin McComb was interviewed at Eurogamer today about Torment: Tides of Numenera. It is the first such interview in a while, perhaps not uncoincidentally coming right on the heels of the announcement that he would be attending the EGX Rezzed convention (which is sponsored by Eurogamer's parent company) in London next month. For the most part, the interview retreads old ground, but there a few tidbits here worth quoting:

The role-playing universe Numenera is "less a chess game and more a storytelling game", according to McComb. For Torment that means combat isn't the bread and butter of the experience - story is.

"We are not giving experience for killing stuff," McComb says. "Numenera is about exploration, it's not about killing people and taking their stuff. In a game where we say 'what does one life matter?', we actually want to make it matter." Not, "What does one life matter? Well, about 25XP!"

He goes on: "We have Crises and Tussles. A Crisis is a hand-crafted encounter, a major thing - a major set-piece. Then we've got Tussles for when you screw up a dialogue or get caught picking the wrong pocket. I don't want to call it a trash combat because hopefully it's all going to be entertaining and fun."

[...] You'll recruit companions, which were a crucial element in Planescape: Torment, but there won't be many and you'll adventure in small parties. There's a chance, too, that your companions will die. In fact, based upon your actions, they could already be dead before you meet them.

"If you choose to seek out one companion earlier than another, then the other companion will be gone from where they are - they might be dead," says McComb. "Or they might be in a situation where you're going to have to work a whole lot harder to extricate them from it. Or they might be getting into something that can change the course of the story.

"We're looking at some really deep reactivity here on things that will change. It's not going to be just, 'Are you going to save the kitten in the burning building? Or are you going to come back two weeks later and save them then?'"

He adds: "A lot of people can perma-die. We can find some weird, hand-wavy explanation about why you can save people but there are certainly a number of options where people can perma-die."

Another reason to be excited is inXile, the developer, which already delivered Wasteland 2 - a nostalgic Kickstarted game - to a very high standard. The bulk of that team now works on Torment, a force that numbers around 25-30. That's a hefty workforce for a game like this. The budget has grown too, from $4.1m as of the end of the Kickstarter campaign up to $4.8m now.

There have been a couple of delays to Torment: Tides of Numenera but the end is finally in sight. The good news is it will "definitely" - read: hopefully - be out this year, according to McComb, although it sounds like there's still an awful lot of work to do. The official date is Q4 2015, but that's "probably late 2015" in actuality. There don't appear to be any plans for an Early Access release, but those who backed the game at the appropriate level will get access to an alpha systems test ahead of the game's full launch.
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